Our garden grown jalapeños vary widely in heat, to the point where I always try a taste before using one in a recipe.
Hatch peppers are a part of the MadMex menu for a month or so each year. I ordered a stuffed hatch pepper appetizer that was painfully hot. The waitress saw me sweating when I ordered my second beer and quickly apologized. She said that there was some variation in heat, and occasionally a pepper was just not edible. She offered a replacement, but I said I was fine. My son was eating the same thing and asked to try a bite of mine, which made him choke and turn red.
Read this book about Tomatoes. It’s partly about US slave labor in Florida (it will turn your stomach), but also partly how the unripe, bread for shape/color/shipping tomatoes we get in the supermarkets are a pale shadow of tomatoes of yore, both in flavor and nutritional value.
Produce is a victim of the modern world. Fruits and vegetables are bred for durability and strains that travel well and not for taste so flavor suffers. That’s one of the reasons back yard produce tastes so good.
I haven’t noticed the Honeycrisp problem in my area. When I do need a substitute, I’ve found that SweeTango apples shipped to this area are consistently very good; they also tend to show up in much smaller batches than Honeycrisps.
This past season’s pomegranates weren’t all that great. They looked nice on the outside, and the arils had a very deep red color, but I only had a few that were really flavorful.
I had some really wonderful naval oranges a few weeks ago that we bought from Wegman’s. Then I bought a couple from Safeway last week and they had pink flesh, were hard to peel and wouldn’t section properly. It’s like they were hybridized with blood oranges or something. Very disappointing.
I grew up in central California, so have wonderful memories of delicious naval oranges, strawberries, artichokes from Watsonville, and all kinds of fresh wonderful fruit. Now I’m in virginia where most stuff is shipped. I’ve told my husband that the places that grow fruit keep the best for their local markets, and ship the second quality stuff. I refuse to buy the pathetic, brown and bruised artichokes they sell here.
A few years ago I went to Seattle to visit a friend, who insisted on taking me to Pike’s Market to see the flower vendors. The flowers were lovely, but when I laid eyes on perfect, fresh globe artichokes the size of cantaloupes, the flowers no longer interested me.
I have another story to tell about getting my mind blown by produce. Have always loved avocados. Visited a friend who lived in Hawaii some years ago and freaked the hell out when I saw a giant avocado tree in her front yard, absolutely DRIPPING in fruit. They weren’t Haas, but another kind, larger with more flesh and small pits. In other words, Nirvana.
I bet it’s because originally they were imported from New Zealand (?), and now they’re mostly just grown in Washington. My suspicion is that there’s some sort of terroir sort of thing going on, in that pretty much any apple grown in Washington in large quantities is going to taste more similar than not. Or possibly it’s some sort of picking/spraying/handling difference.
I think these guys were iffy from the start – I’ve been buying them for years, and it seems like a 50/50 mix of bland and amazing. The first couple I had were the best peaches I’d ever tasted. I bought more a few weeks later that never ripened. I still like them because they’re less drippy than a standard peach.
Re: Honeycrisp apples – when I was a kid, they were only available from local orchards and were heavenly. Nowadays, I can buy them from the grocey store and they’re merely good. However, I can still go to the orchard, and they’re still heavenly.
Apples, I blame storage. Every so often we get a dry or mealy one: my husband believes they are the previous years. First I gave up on red delicious, then I gave up on Granny Smith, then the Fujis went south.
Definitely avocados and strawberries have deteriorated. The only fruit that I believe has improved is the pineapple.
I disagree on the pineapple, having tasted one where they are grown; in other words, fresh, not picked green and allowed to ripen en route or after purchase.
Too many things to list, but my current complaint: where is all the goddamned spinach?! I don’t want soggy bags of baby spinach with stems all over the place. I want huge heads of crinkly real spinach. Not mustard greens, not chicory, and certainly not everloving kale. Just spinach.
Gahhh!
Oh, all right. I haven’t had a plum or nectarine that smelled, tasted, or chewed like the real thing in at least a decade. I’ve almost forgotten what they taste like.
Oh, I forgot to mention before another fruit epiphany I experienced that tells me the problem is storage and transportation. I’m really iffy about bananas. I can’t stand when they get the slightest overripe, preferring them slightly green. They’re less sweet that way, but there is something I don’t like about the cloyingly sweet ripe banana. Then Hubby and I did a vacation trip, part of which was a tour in Grenada where banana farms are abundant. They have so many that the locals sell them by the dozen/half dozen at roadside stands. Our tour guide bought a few and offered them to us. I first declined politely but when he pressured me, I took one to be polite. It was properly ripe, slightly bruised skin, which I would normally hate. It was absolute heaven with no hint of the cloying flavor I hate. I considered eating another one, but by then the guide was driving again.
A funny off-topic thing I learned from that nice guide: there is market pressure from the UK for straight bananas. He was telling us how the UK buyers want only the straightest bananas and don’t seem to understand that bananas are curved because they grow in clusters. I guess they expect the farmers to splint the baby bananas to ensure they grow straight. That would be a hysterical sight!
I’m not really sure why we try to pick out specific produce. I’ve always assumed it’s widespread and a result of the changes in methods of production that increase profit but at best don’t help taste and at worst make the produce much less tasty.
For example, tomatoes have been bred to increase the red color, making them more visually appealing. They’ve also been bred to reduce spoilage and susceptibility to diseases. Unfortunately, that has also made them both less tasty and less nutritious.
This quote from the article almost certainly applies to lots of produce if you abstract it a bit. (Or I could be completely wrong with all my assumptions above. I’d be happy to be proven wrong.)
I’ve always loved apricots, but never realized how wonderful they could be until I tasted the ones sold in farmers’ markets in southern France. I think the fruit were from Africa. They were large and sweet, and the flavor put all others to shame. Unfortunately, they were obscenely expensive as well.
I’ve always thought I didn’t like fruit much, but then I realized I only like fruit in season. During January I go on a clementine-buying spree because they’re in season (and $6 a box at the store), in June I want fresh strawberries, in July and August I’m hunting down all the blackberry brambles I can get to, and in September-October I’m at the farmer’s market every weekend buying half-pecks of apples. The rest of the year I get by on dried or canned. Whenever I buy out-of-season fruit I’m always disappointed.
Pineapples don’t ripen after being picked, so they’re just picking them slightly underripe because otherwise they’re too fragile to withstand shipping. It’s not a cultivar thing, it’s a shipping thing, and I doubt they’ve ever been particularly good in the US relative to where they’re grown.
That’s why you’ll sometimes see “Jet-fresh” or “Jet” pineapple- they’re pineapples picked as close as realistically possible to ripeness and then flown to market.
Apples from grocery stores are always lousy compared to orchard-bought ones. Red Delicious apples from supermarkets are the worst offenders and are probably to blame for many people not knowing that apples can be delicious.
On the other hand, good produce can be quite slow to spread. We were eating bi-color sweet corn (peaches and cream, honeycomb, etc.) in Indiana thirty years ago, and I’ve only seen it in Georgia for the last three or four years.
Interesting. Some of the ones I see in the supermarket are definitely green in color. If you let them stand a few days they certainly appear to ripen as they turn yellow.
